Last weekend I drove home to Michigan from Colorado to visit my family and friends for the holidays. During the seventeen hour drive there I was so full of excitement that I never once got tired. I drove straight though. I couldn’t wait to spend a whole week with all of the people I’d been missing since August, getting coffees at my favorite shop, doughnuts from my favorite baker, and the best damn tacos in the whole world.
Then I got to Michigan and got horribly sick. I spent most of my trip blowing my nose and laying in bed with a fever while my beautiful friends and family drank spiked eggnog in the hot tub and opened gifts without me.
And then, at the end of the trip, I got some unexpected news which ultimately negatively effects my income. While contemplating finding new/additional work and possibly moving to a new little space (yes…that noise is my heart breaking into a billion little pieces), I decided to leave my best pup Mugs in my mom’s care for the time being.
So I’m driving back to Colorado dog-less, sobbing so hard that my eyeballs actually hurt. Because, besides loving my dog what is probably an unhealthy amount, I’m also in a hard place. It’s a time of so many transitions and so much change, hard work, and general suffering. I don’t like when things change, and feeling like a failure is hard impossible for me.
I was somewhere in Iowa, scanning radio stations, when this song came on and was exactly what I needed to hear. “You gotta be bad, you gotta be bold, you gotta be wiser,” … it was like divine intervention on the Iowa plains.
It was the gentle reminder that I needed that I moved halfway across the country for change. To be bad, bold, and maybe, just maybe, so that I could learn how to be a little wiser. Not so everything could be easy and magical and wonderful. Life was already basically like that in Michigan. I decided to move to Colorado to shake myself up. Because although life was basically wonderful in Michigan, I wasn’t writing anything, and for me, that means that something isn’t right.
But here’s the thing. Since I’ve been in Denver, I still haven’t written a lot. Because I’ve been really focused on making life perfect, and wonderful, and secure. I haven’t been as bad and as bold as I’d planned to be. I haven’t gotten harder, tougher, or stronger.
So here’s to 2015 being a year of all the changes. A snow/ice storm in Nebraska on my way home gave me a much needed night by myself in a Super 8 hotel room, and all the time I’d been craving to think about what it is that I really want to do. I’ve got a lot of ideas, and I can’t wait to share them with you.
Thank you for sticking with me in 2014, and for helping me learn to be brave.
Danielle
DANIELLE ALEXANDER 